Hey y’all, welcome back to Unfit to Print.
Today’s newsletter is late because I was in southeastern Missouri hunting snow geese yesterday, and my flight home didn’t have WiFi.
Our hunting guide, by the way, referred to the Super Bowl halftime as the “bad rabbit show.”
He’s probably treating it with the un-seriousness it deserves. Now watch me write this soap-boxy screed anyway …
FALLEN GLORY
The Super Bowl halftime show was actually VERY CONSERVATIVE, y’all …
…
Still here?
I hope you know by now that I’m being facetious. But that was the sincere take from a number of mainstream commentators.
Our beloved Washington Post, which was on the receiving end of my skewering last week, published an article claiming Bad Bunny’s halftime performance celebrated “wholesome, traditional family values.”
Yeah, I still don’t feel bad that hundreds of them got fired.
Kim Iversen, a Rumble host, mocked conservatives who took issue with the show, pointing out that a couple got legally married in the middle of the performance.
The song leading into the wedding has lyrics about getting oral sex from a flight attendant, smoking weed, and going to the strip club. Romantic.
I guess we could get super excited about a Super Bowl wedding, but then I feel like I’d have to celebrate Disney adult weddings — and I will just never be about that.
(By the way, the groom is a nurse. If you read Unfit to Print last week, you know what I’m talking about).
Anyway, a 30-second wedding could hardly overshadow the totality of the visuals in the performance, which were profane and degrading.
Just down the set from the freshly married couple, two men were raunchily bumping genitalia.
Heated Rivalry? Out.
Front Tackle? In.
Then there were the prostitutes grinding in a truck bed…
But worse than the rampant promiscuous dancing was the broader message delivered to America.
According to Bad Bunny, America is an evil colonizer. It is responsible for Puerto Rico’s failing electric grid and general impoverishment, even though we send them seven to eight times more money than they pay in taxes. America, he claimed, is not just the United States of America, but every country in the American continent.
What were we supposed to take away? We suck so bad that we shouldn’t mind being invaded.
Not sure why they’d want to invade us if we suck so bad, but Bad Bunny conveniently fails to address that point.
As Daily Caller writer Natalie Sandoval put it, “[Bad Bunny’s] performance was the equivalent of planting a flag. ‘I don’t particularly care about the thing you like, but I know you like it, so it’s mine now.’”
CNN even admitted the true purpose of Bad Bunny’s show:
“Last night, Bad Bunny asked: What if I’m the real American?” a CNN writer said.
The setup of the stage made even clearer that Bad Bunny wasn’t as interested in entertaining as he was in using this platform as a means to claim America for himself and his merry gang of twerkers.
Videos from the stands show Bad Bunny was out of view for at least half of the audience during the majority of his set. As he snaked through the sugar cane maze and shouted “ay, ay, ay” out of tune, those who paid thousands of dollars to be in person were frozen out of any real connection to what was happening at the 50-yard line.
It wasn’t so much a performance as it was a global countersignal.
Let’s pivot to the Olympics, where anti-American sentiment has similarly taken over what is meant to be a nationally unifying experience.
Athletes like champion skier Mikaela Shiffrin, figure skater Amber Glenn, and skier Hunter Hess have all dutifully crapped all over our country during press conference appearances.
Gus Kenworthy, another skier who defected to Great Britain because he wasn’t good enough to make our team, posted a photo of himself urinating “fuck ICE” into the Italian snow.
It should be pretty obvious that someone can be proud to represent their country even if they don’t agree with everything it does.
But a bevy of American athletes think it’s edifying to list off all of the reasons they aren’t currently proud to represent the U.S., yet expect us all watching at home to continue cheering for them.
You’re there for one reason and one reason only: to bring home gold for your nation. Not to bellyache about the current administration or how hard it supposedly is to wear the stars and stripes in the Olympic Village.
National pride was the motivation for the ‘Miracle on Ice’ hockey team in the 1980 Olympics. Coach Herb Brooks employed a deliberate strategy to break down collegiate rivalries and interpersonal drama to unite his team under one mission and one flag. That shared goal propelled them to a shock upset over the Soviets.
Their victory was a symbol of hope and perseverance for the entire country.
In contrast, the current posturing from athletes and musicians about modern politics feels meant to demoralize. To take away that common thread that allowed us to feel connected to our fellow countrymen.
And don’t even get me started on the traitor Eileen Gu … that’s a different topic for a different day.
I’ll close with this:
When I saw Lindsey Vonn’s likely career-ending crash, it seemed like a bigger symbol of our own national decline.
Here’s a superstar athlete, one of the best of all time, who routinely shares how grateful and honored she is to represent America. She is a dogged fighter who will do anything to win. Heck, she managed to win a World Cup at the age of 41 thanks to her sheer determination.
Her body, though, was practically held together by duct tape. People started to wonder why she wasn’t starting a family, why she wasn’t letting the next generation take over.
Then she was screaming out in pain, leg twisted, after completing just 13 seconds of her Olympic run.
America is getting older, too. It’s our 250th birthday this year. Our institutions are cobbled together with rusty screws and steel plates. Our sense of community is as torn as Vonn’s ACL. And unlike Vonn, we don’t even have a locker room full of teammates who want us to succeed.
What scares me is — are we about to crash, too?
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I suspect it was a good thing it was in Spanish, the translation we would probably find more offensive. Are we becoming the "useful idiots". Can we really fall any further without becoming unrecognizable?